Compares Holocaust research with interpretations of the French Revolution to reveal new insights into what made the persecution of Jews possible.

1. Between the French Revolution and the Holocaust: events that represent an age; 2. A dominant interpretive framework; 3. Narrative form and historical sensation; 4. Beginnings and endings; 5. The totality and limits of historical context; 6. Contingency, the essence of history; 7. Ideology, race, and culture.

Alon Confino is a professor of history at the University of Virginia, where he has taught since 1993. He has written extensively and influentially on historical memory, historical method and German history. Among his books are The Nation As a Local Metaphor: Württemberg, Imperial Germany, and National Memory, 1871-1918 (1997) and Germany As a Culture of Remembrance: Promises and Limits of Writing History (2006). As a visiting professor, Confino has taught at the Hebrew University, Tel Aviv University and École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and was recently a visiting fellow at the European University Institute in Florence. He has received grants from the Fulbright, Humboldt, DAAD, and Lady Davis foundations, the Institute of Advanced Studies at the Hebrew University, the Social Science Research Council, the Israel Academy of Sciences, and the Center for Advanced Holocaust Studies at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington.